OpenSearch
Rationale
OpenSearch is an open-source search engine forked from ElasticSearch that came as a response to some licensing issues Amazon had with Elastic, the original developers.
- It is maintained by AWS and a community of developers.
- It enables full-text search over indexed data with a flexible API.
- It is a SaaS-oriented, so it does not require managing infrastructure on our own.
- It supports local deployments, enabling us to run it on our machines, which is especially useful for development and ephemeral environments.
- All its settings can be written as code using Terraform.
Alternatives
- ElasticSearch (on AWS): Not recommended as the last supported version before the license change is 7.10, which is quite old now.
- ElasticSearch (on Elastic Cloud): It implies using a different cloud provider with its own pricing model for very little extra features compared to what's available with OpenSearch.
Usage
We use OpenSearch for powering search and filtering features in our Platform.
Guidelines
- You can access the OpenSearch console after authenticating to AWS.
- Any changes to OpenSearch infrastructure must be done via merge requests.
- The production instance is deployed behind the VPC, if you require access locally, connect using the VPN.